Month: October 2011

When performing land navigation, it sometimes becomes difficult to remember everything you need to. The most vital information being your pace count. Your pace count gives you an estimate of how far you’ve traveled since your last waypoint. It gives you an idea of where you are and how far you have to go to the next waypoint. Trust me when I say that losing your pace count can completely ruin your day, you either have to backtrack to the last waypoint, or completely recalculate your location from a more difficult location. Having pace count beads, also known as ranger beads, helps you keep track of your pace count and is an immeasurable help in a land navigation scenario. You can purchase these if you’d like, but in the case that you don’t have them when you need them, yours break inconveniently, or you’re like me and are too cheap to pay for something this easy to make yourself, Instructables.com has an article on how to make your own beads from three simple materials, though you can feasibly fabricate these out of any reasonable material.

Cooking over an open camp fire isn’t exactly the most predictable way to cook. It’s easy to char the outside of a meal, while leaving the inside raw or under cooked. Cooking in a pan is even more unpredictable, plus you constantly have to monitor your meal to ensure it doesn’t burn. However, boiling water over a campfire turns out the same result every time – boiled water. If you have a thermos, you can add boiling water to your ingredients, let them simmer for a while and when you come back, you’ve got a properly cooked (read unburned) meal waiting for you.

Antibiotics will become an important commodity in the P.A.W. They can mean the difference between life and death in a world where 1st World medicine isn’t readily available. Carrying around a full tube of antibiotics can be unwieldy and cumbersome. Also, if antibiotics are scare/valuable enough, you won’t want to be seen carrying around a large tube of it by anyone else. There are single use antibiotics commercially available but they are more expensive than it’s worth. Brian Green, from Brian’s Backpacking Blog, writes a post on how to make your own single use antibiotic packs.

Tristan Gooley is a writer, explorer and navigator. He is renowned as a “Natural Navigator,” and he recently wrote an article for BBC News outlining six basic steps for getting your bearings in an urban environment without any instruments. While his guide is geared towards citizens of the U.K. the principles remain the same and the details of what he writes need only be modified to make it work for wherever you are in the world.

Do you like running? Do you like obstacle courses? Think you could outlast fast-moving zombies through one for 5km? Well here’s your opportunity! Run For Your Lives is a 5k Obstacle course with an added twist – zombies. Spread throughout the 5k course are 12 obstacles that have to be overcome by the participants while they run away from zombies. Each participant has a belt with a number of flags attached representing health. For only $67 you too can test your mettle in a zombie survival situation.

Having the right tools is important to survival. Having a bow could be the difference between “making it” and starving to death. You may not be able to get your hands on a fancy compound bow, but Instructables user dejapong shows us how to build a makeshift bow for less than $20 worth of materials from a hardware store.